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E-mail letters, April 19, 2010

Kevin McCarney’s comments regarding Anne Weaver’s letter were excellent and right on. Unfortunately I believe his letter will fall on deaf ears.

It appears Ms. Weaver gathers her “factual information” from either MoveOn.org or The Huffington Post.
Will Eidson
Fruita

Hollywood can do
anything in name of ‘art’

Movie-goers are not permitted to shout “fire” in a theater, but Hollywood producers can apparently shout anything they wish in a theater. Witness the movie review of “Kick-Ass,” the latest prurient offering out of Tinseltown.

We rise up with indignation when sexual predators who are “nobodies” move into our neighborhoods. Yet, the predators of Hollywood, under the guise of “art,” have free reign to do as they wish with children, raking in millions in the process as many in our increasingly desensitized society shell out the bucks to go see this trash.

Oh, how prophetic the words of Psalm 12:8: “Wickedness struts about freely when what is vile is honored among men.”
Bill Forbes
Whitewater

Lawmaker should guarantee
repayment of payday loans

I can suggest a simple way out of the “outrageous” and “predatory” payday loan problem touted in the April 16 article in The Daily Sentinel. And it doesn’t require any government intervention.

If Rep. Mark Ferrandino will guarantee that there will be no defaults or late payments (sufficient funds in an escrow account will be required), I will gladly offer the loans for 25 percent.

Of course, Rep. Ferrandino will have to cover all office, administrative, and collection costs, so he can tack on any service fee he feels necessary, just so I get my guaranteed 25 percent, net.

By the way, if you really could get 520 percent, as the article claims, an initial investment of $500 would be worth over $7 billion in 10 years.
Paul Kelly
Delta

‘Free’ spring cleanup
is anything but free

“Free Spring Cleanup For City Residents Begins April 26th.”

That announcement is copied from the City of Grand Junction Web page. It leads to this announcement:
“A FREE service for City residential properties.”

It’s “free” except for the city property taxes paid in mortgages or rents for the year since the last clean-up. “Free” except for the sales taxes added to every purchase made for a year.

So, I’d either like a tax refund for all the money I’ve pre-paid for this service, or an apology for lying to me.

Seriously, the idea of anything “free” from the government is an insult to taxpaying citizens who work hard to provide the funds for government.
Gene Kinsey
Grand Junction

Notion that all taxes
diminish freedom is absurd

In George Will’s April 18 column regarding the Value Added Tax, he demonstrates a
frail grasp of American history when he states, “all taxation diminishes freedom.”

Absurd.

With no taxes Nazi jackboots would have been on the throats of half of America; the other half would have been under members of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere.

No taxes? No American university system, envied throughout the world and the
greatest engine of freedom the world has ever seen.

Indians paid no taxes. By Will’s reckoning that made them perfectly free. Look how that worked for them.

The headline for the lead story in The Daily Sentinel on April 17 reads: “Be civil, Ritter urges.” Wow.

The political debate has gotten heated. But the Democrats and Governor Bill Ritter are urging a more civil discussion. Those nasty Republicans, on the other hand, are making up their own facts, spreading “innuendo” and “outright lies” about our elected Democratic officials.
Unfortunately, the Sentinel reporter does not provide his readers with any “innuendos” or “outright lies” on which his article was supposedly based. He does mention issues the tea party has rallied about, “particularly health care reform” and “changes to regulations on the state’s oil and gas industry.” A lead story with no supporting evidence, welcome to modern journalism.
Do the Republicans disagree with Democrats over “health care reform?” Yes. A March Rasmussen polls finds that 54 percent of Americans oppose health care reform while only 41 percent approve of it. Do Republicans have a right to express the views of those 54 percent of Americans who disagree? The Constitution suggests that they do.
Almost as disturbing as the lack of factual support for a lead story, is the hypocrisy involved. The Sentinel reporter has completely forgotten the Bush years. President George W. Bush was a victim of the most vicious political criticism imaginable for eight long years.

All one has to do is pull up Hillary Clinton’s famous “I am mad as hell speech” on YouTube to get a flavor of the discourse during the Bush Administration. There were also plays and “how-to” blogs depicting Bush’s assassination and liberals camping out on Bush’s doorstep down in Texas.

The Sentinel reporter missed it all. This article is so biased with so much hypocrisy that it could have been written by a Democratic Party henchman.
Bill Weidner
Grand Junction

West Slope faces undercount
due to Census Bureau mistakes

Recent press reports regarding defects in the Census Bureau’s address database should be cause for serious concern by local elected officials and our Congressional delegation.

As the Census Bureau recently confirmed, urban residents who get their mail at post office boxes “most likely” did not receive a Census questionnaire.

Likewise, local anecdotal evidence chronicled by The Daily Sentinel’s Emily Anderson, suggests that the bureau’s inventory of “housing units” is not nearly as complete as Census officials would have us believe.

Address canvassing on the Western Slope was conducted last year by the Colorado Springs Early Census Office, but was both haphazard and rushed for timely completion.

Moreover, as the Government Accountability Office reported to Congress, “Significant Problems of Critical Automation Program Contribute to Risks Facing 2010 Census ,” the entire Census was at risk of failure due to non-performance of the computer software upon which it depended. In April 2008, the Census Bureau cancelled contracts for that software – except for address canvassing!

Logically, if the housing-unit inventory was incomplete, then reported response rates are commensurately overstated. Thus, if only 95 percent of housing units were accurately inventoried, then an apparent response rate of 64 percent reported earlier this month translates into a real response rate of only 60 percent

Meanwhile, as of April 15, the official response rate nationwide was only 68 percent, versus 72 percent in 2000, according to an April 16 Newsweek article.

Locally, the combined result of an incomplete address database and a low response rate will likely be a significant undercount of Western Slope inhabitants, resulting in the loss of millions of dollars in federal monies that would otherwise flow to our government entities.
Bill Hugenberg
Grand Junction

Harmon’s column amounted to
‘blithering irrationality’

Gary Harmon has once again proved why he should not be in the capacity he has with The Daily Sentinel.

Somehow, in a blithering state of irrationality, he has managed to hold President Obama in more contempt than the former president in the targeting of two terrorists as wanted dead or alive.

May I remind Harmon that U.S. citizens have been labeled as wanted this way since the
1850s? May I remind him that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the CIA prisoner scandal violating rights of thousands happened at the hands of President George W. Bush? May I remind Harmon that we are still in the same state of war that Bush got us into, and these two gentlemen have caused the deaths of other innocent Americans?
Fred Pittenger
Grand Junction

The only things we can be sure of are what we detect with our eyes and how we interpret it with our own real experience. With that in mind, how would I, as a data processor with unlimited funds to work with, acquire all the data needed to establish a worldwide average centigrade temperature?

1. Standardize all temperature data devices with a tenth of a degree accuracy in cities all over the world, including both poles.

2. Select a city where all the temperature data can be established at exactly the same time, same second, every day, keeping in mind that the 24 time differences will sometimes be day, night, and times between.

3. Stage 1. Average out all the temperature data.

4. Stage 2. Average out the temperature differences between all the cities, east, west, north, and south, near and far, and both poles.

5. Stage 3. Calculate plus or minus one tenth of a degree tolerances on each data collector.

6. Conclusion: The accumulation of all the tenth-of-a-degree tolerances could be averaged out, but that wouldn’t result in a real average temperature, only an approximate one. If human error is added, the result would be even more theoretical. So in the end, all you’d have is a theoretical average temperature, not enough credible evidence to force us to change our life style.
Richard L. Stover
Grand Junction